Australian combat troops are being withdrawn from Iraq. Some Liberal MPs are still running the cut and pasted “cut and run” line. Others are decrying the withdrawal as a “diversion” from the all important issue of petrol prices. Apparently oblivious to the fact that the Iraq War might have something to do with… petrol prices.
35 Responses to “Australia’s war is over”
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John Howard is “baffled”:
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,23795420-29277,00.html?source=cmailer
Well, just call me Brendan’s first point in his reply to the PM’s statement about the withdrawal is to invoke the attacks of September 11th, 2001.
Well done, Brendan. Round of applause.
They have not returned, they were never there.
Given that current Iraqu oil production is currently higher than before the invasion I don’t think its clear that petrol prices would be lower if the invasion had not occurred. Especially if the standoff with the US had continued with oil exports restricted and a certain amount of risk premium with the threat of war still around.
Also I think its worth noting that although Australia is withdrawing 500 troops, there are still going to be around 1000 left in the country. But then I think both Howard’s and Rudd’s actions have been more about symbolism than there being a real difference anyway.
Presumably by the fact that someone has honoured an election promise.
About time someone in Ozblogistan picked up this story.
The ICC Action group in Melbourne has sent a full legal brief to the International Criminal Court (ICC) alleging former prime minister John Howard committed a war crime by sending troops to Iraq. SMH report here.
The move has been supported by Democrats Senator Lyn Allison and the NSW division of the Medical Association for the Prevention of War.
Perhaps Howard should have “further deepened” with the US by refusing to sign onto the International Criminal Court: [link]
How can a withdrawal of Aussie troops from Iraq be a diversion from the petrol price debate when the whole country has known since last December or before that Rudd was pulling out combat troops this June? Just askin’?
And no, the war is NOT over as we will still have some troops in Iraq and even more troops going into Afghanistan.Lets not get too excited about this.
No, Paul, Kevin Rudd was so worried last week about the vicious attacks on him by take-no-prisoners DOCTOR Nelson, that he rang up the Head of the Armed Forces and told him to start withdrawing troops.
That’s the way these things work, you know - you don’t have to do any planning, any consultation, you can just pull 500 personnel out on a whim.
Tossers.
I’m no fan of the
colonial resource grab at taxpayer’s expenseIraq War and I don’t think we shuld’ve ever been there but as it looks like Obama’s gonna be the next US Prez I wonder what will happen to the region if he fulfils his promises and withdraws the troops.>
My guess an excalation of an already savage civil war with the Shi’ite’s victorious, an extension of theocratic rule, possibly with war with Kurdistan (hey Israel here’s an opportunity to make a friend in the neighbourhood).
>
FUBAR.
Makes Rupert look like even more of a goose with his promise of oil at $20 a barrel.
Australia withdraws, Gandhi returns. It’s the everyday politics of the long-expected and inevitable.
(Welcome back G.)
War crimes brief sent to ICC
Ever so true, mckenzie @9.
Rudd only hatched that devious defence deployment plan after a couple of his other tricks fell through… like the ol’… ‘obesity or breastfeeding tactic’. The Doc was, almost, one step ahead. See his words from AM below.
“And I’ll say another thing: I’ll bet you within the next 24 hours he’ll come up with some campaign on obesity or breastfeeding or he’ll be with celebrities, he’ll do something to try to distract Australians from this. We will not wear it.”
http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2008/s2258808.htm
Possibly not Cate Blanchett this time round!
What will be interesting is if Nelson doesn’t get any “bounce” in tomorrow’s Newspoll from all this emoting about petrol. If so, will he stick with the script, or turn his own attention to the next cunning plan to improve his poll numbers?
I wonder why he said that. It seems obvious to me that one of the agenda items on Messrs Cheney and Bush’s list was to bump the price of oil up. However I reckon Rupert’s blanket support for the war had a lot more to do with amendments to media ownership laws in the English speaking world that were favourable to his interests. He got ‘em too. And then he backed away from Blair, Bush and Howard.
Really? According to the IEA, Iraqi production in April had dropped by 70kb/d to 2.34mb/d. Before the beginning of hostilities in 2003, Iraqi oil production was about 2.7mb/d, having dropped from pre-war peaks in 1980 and 1990 of 3.5mb/d.
The following regarding petrol prices comes from The Independent on Sunday a couple of weeks ago. GoogleNews the piece, as I’ve lost the URL to link to:
The invasion of Iraq by Britain and the US has trebled the price of oil, according to a leading expert, costing the world a staggering $6 trillion in higher energy prices alone.
The oil economist Dr Mamdouh Salameh, who advises both the World Bank and the UN Industrial Development Organisation (Unido), told The Independent on Sunday that the price of oil would now be no more than $40 a barrel, less than a third of the record $135 a barrel reached last week, if it had not been for the Iraq war.
The war had stuff all to do with oil/petrol beyond it was clear sanctions were steadily breaking down and Saddam would have had the cashflow to re-arm. So you might make an argument that if we did nothing and allowed sanctions to effectively dissolve oil prices may have been a bit lower. Now the Insurgency is largely defeated we will start to see a pretty big investment program but it will be still some years away from releiving the supply shortage in any meaningful way
What touching naivete (always assuming that Lib Randall is sincere in his stated sentiments).
1. Al Qaeda didn’t exist in Iraq until after the COW arrived. AQ in Iraq was an artefact of the COW.
2. Post hoc ergo propter hoc. The metrics of “the Surge” are a function of the universally acknowledged fact that the end of Bush and the end of the GOP come Nov 2008 means the end of a powerful American presence in Iraq. (Both Clinton and Obama have said so.)
All sides are keeping their powder dry until that eventuality. Why stand in the way of the Americans when they are itching to leave? Sunnis are in a particularly horrible situation. Perhaps their interests lie in demonstrating that Iraq is ungovernable by ramping up violence. Yet, that violence simply reinforces anti-war sentiment in the US. Zugzwang.
Bush has to make “the Surge” look credible only until Jan. 2009, when he shambles, unlamented from the world stage. I presume that Lib Randall intends to stay in politics longer than that. And if he does, I expect someone will remind him of his failure to grasp reality when Shiite forces get round to settling accounts in Iraq.
Chris said ….
….”Given that current Iraqu oil production is currently higher than before the invasion I don’t think its clear that petrol prices would be lower if the invasion had not occurred.”
Piers Ackerman spoke about that recently, with a handy hand held graph, on “The Insiders”, recently.
Do you have the details? ie real sources.
You could well be right - it probably depends on exactly when you measure the previous point. I saw it mentioned here that levels are higher (this was back in december):
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7144774.stm
which probably measured the output while Iraq was under sanctions (and probably still would be if they hadn’t been invaded). Besides there’s so many variables around - eg OPEC countries increasing output to compensate for lack of production from Iraq that I think its pretty difficult to justify a claim that the war has caused the current petrol prices. There’s a lot of other factors such as increased demand and speculation affecting petrol prices. Doesn’t stop Rudd from mentioning Iraq every time he talks about petrol prices though
M Baudrillard at [3]: bonjour!
Are you the blighter who wrote that excellent book, “The Gulf War Did Not Happen”, concerning the mirage we called Gulf War 1?
Bienvenue, M’sieur! Would you like to tell us about more tomes or articles in which you use(d) the same methodology? Can your analyses be applied to non-war non-events? Or must the non-existences be warped by the very particular exigiencies of media-mediated military destruction??
we await your bons mots
Well according to Mr Bolt we have won,and IRAQ id a democracy,so all the yanks have to do is keep the troops there for the next 100 or years,I sometimes wonder if he lives on the same planet as the rest of it.
I thought we won some time ago ask GW Bush,on the Aircraft Carrier, mission accomplished ect,what utter BS
For years, wingnuts and Boltheads have been saying that withdrawal is wrong because we need to stay the course, we can’t cut and run, and we must fight until we win. Now, they’re saying that Rudd has our troops “slinking away” and that we should be staying because we have won. Flip. Flop. Wishy. Washy.
Of course, the whole “victory” argument is a furphy, since the victory conditions can and will be redefined as required. Bolt says it’s a democracy - no need to examine whether it’s a functioning one. Violence is at its lowest levels in years - i.e., fewer people are being exploded, but there is still chaos and mayhem to spare.
Anyone notice that the Australian forces handed their base over to US forces, allegedly raising Iraqi fears on what their new masters would be like. What happened to training Iraqi forces to take over? Then, of course, there is oil in this part of southern Iraq so maybe it makes sense to someone. But you wonder who decises these things…ADF High Command.. Rudd/Fitzgibbon…Washington?
M. Ambigulous:
That was me, or a simulacrum of me. This construct isn’t up to judging which.
My ‘body of work’ should be familiar to those who passed the temptation to dismiss it’s entirity on the strength of an essay title, which excludes but a tiny fraction of those who discuss it.
I began writing about the cunning duplicity of household products and their packaging in manufacturing and sating the needs of a frazzled society - The System of Objects (1968). Then in The Consumer Society (1970), The Mirror of Production (1973), and Forget Foucault (1977) I examined the expanding role of the object vis a vis the subject, and the collapse of notions of resistance and subversion into what I suppose people would call ‘lifestyles’ and ‘product’, terms which themselves are replete with notions of the objectification of subjective individual expression, repackaged to fit the needs of a sublimated, semiotics-enamoured capitalism.
The book, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1995) - which began in 1991 as a series of articles ‘The Gulf War will not happen’, ‘The Gulf War is not happening’ and finally ‘The Gulf War did not happen’ (how’s that for ballsy newspaper commentary?) applied much of Simulacra and Simulation (1981) to the events of that summer. In the latter I argue that the power of the image, namely its ability to exponentially replicate, adjust, and redraw the subject matter it draws upon has blurred the boundaries between the real and the imaginary - the copy becomes more ‘real’ the original.
In that light I argued that the ‘war’ as experienced by viewers around the world had but the barest outlines in common with the events which unfolded in and around the Persian Gulf 1990-1991. Rather than the brutal reality of a hegemonic power crushing a noncompliant ex-vassal, replete with the grubby stains of realpolitik viewers were presented with a sanitised, pre-packaged virtual war, carefully managed with the assistance of a complicit media.
My considered opinion of what my opinion would be appears to suggest that yes, I indeed think that processes of simulation and the murder of real extend far beyond the simulation of warfare and into every facet of contemporary society, which now familiarises itself to itself through the lense of the camera but is no longer sure who’s filming.
Glad to see we’ve been training the Iraqi army. It should be able to stop a Shiite/Sunni civil war.
The bits of it that pick the right side, definately.
Chris @ 21:
Kingsley, you can’t be serious.
The US Dollar has been the world’s reserve currency since 1945, and its main strength today is that it’s the currency that oil is traded in. In 2002, Iraq announced that it would sell oil in Euros, not US Dollars.
Iraq’s oil reserves are about a quarter of that available to OPEC, which produces 75 per cent of the world’s oil. Other oil-producing nations inside and outside OPEC were looking at doing the same, as the Euro at the time was getting stronger and the US Dollar was getting weaker. The result to the US of an OPEC switch to the Euro was described in 2003 in The Economist as bringing on “a quick and devastating dollar and Wall Street crash that would make 1929 look like a $50 casino bet.”
So, although not stated widely at the time, the Iraq invasion had quite a bit to do with oil/petrol and the control of its market currency if not its supply.
As for the sanctions “steadily breaking down,” well, the AWB affair was the prime example of that.
Had “we done nothing”, then oil prices would have been substantially lower than today. The Iraq conflict has made a large part of an eighth of OPEC’s reserves inaccessible. Iraqi oil production went from about 2.6 million barrels per day in February 2003 to about 50,000 barrels per day in April 2003. Five years later, it is just getting back to early 2003 levels. Remember, we’re talking about ten per cent of the world’s known accessible oil reserves here. You don’t seriously suggest that the disruption of the past five years hasn’t affected the world’s oil prices?
The Independent’s Robert Fisk, and academic Juan Cole better than I can.
But isn’t lobbing 100 8kg fragmentation charges per month at 1,500km/h into a densely-populated suburb rather impolite and somewhat counter-productive? I seem to recall hearing that the Iraqi insurgency were “largely defeated” more than once over the past five years, too.
Iran also has about an eighth of the OPEC reserves, and if you listen carefully you’ll hear sabres being rattled in the direction of Tehran. What would happen to oil prices if there’s a “regime-change” assault on Iran?
Late night. Forgot words.
“… Robert Fisk and academic Juan Cole can refute that better than I can.”
The White House today responded to anti-war criticism from Kevin Rudd.
The New York Times links to an SMH interactive timeline.
Huh?
Does Dolly think that the post of PM comes with a licence to lie?
If Dolly wants to engage in this debate in a sensible way, he needs to explain how his government came to accept a mental frame of disingenuous naivete as an acceptable attitude of mind for a national government to adopt.
Terangeree said:
You might have missed the first paragraph of that bbc report:
I see you are quoting other contradictory numbers in a later comment so I accept that the IEA may simply be wrong….
It is however worth noting that other countries are capable of increasing production output but have declined to do so (for which may well be good reasons for them in terms of increasing profit).
Petrol prices are going up and generally speaking are going to continue to do so. Blaming it on the Iraq war is primarily a political tool to distract from the fact that there is really nothing this or the previous government could have done about it directly. Saying that they are investing in public transport which will help in a few years time simply doesn’t have the same impact as just blaming it on a previous government.